Just thought I should do a quick post about a command that is extremely useful but often forgotten and that command is "watch". Syntax of this command is: watch [-n SEC] [-t] PROG ARGS where "n" is the interval in seconds (2 by default). This command is used as a wrapper, to constantly update results from [...]

A few months ago, I was helping out a customer with a time configuration issue on their vSphere environment. For one specific question, I investigated and wrote the post: ESXi Time Configuration: Don’t point it towards the Windows Domain name However, while doing the investigations, I went through various documents produced by VMware. As NTP [...]

A client asked me what happens if ESXi servers are pointed towards the Windows domain name in “Time Configuration” and one or more domain controllers are not contactable. While I had a theory, I realised I have never tested what actually happens and what is the failure process. I have seen many environments where using [...]

This post is about a very useful one-liner I use often and one that has saved me a lot of headache in the past. I tweeted about this one earlier in the year as well but thought this one actually deserves a blog post so that it's not lost in the large space that is [...]

I always wondered why there is no book that specifically focusses on VMware networking, given its importance when it comes to deployment and maintenance of a stable virtual platform. No need for me to think that any more as "Networking for VMware Administrators" by Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl) and Steve Pantol (@StevePantol) is available for purchase [...]

We all know that Network I/O Control is your friend when it comes to production deployments of vSphere in general. Today, I quickly wanted to make a point that NIOC is also great when it comes to home labs and why we should have it enabled, if possible. A few days back, I was deploying [...]

Recently, I was building a nested ESXi environment in my lab, based on vSphere 5.5. Regular readers will remember that I generally use VMware Workstation (version 10, in this case) to run my virtual environment. I usually have my ESXi hosts configured with 8 NICs, which is pretty handy when I have to play with [...]

These days, I am working on a project involving VMware Capacity Planner. Part of its deployment means that one has to troubleshoot access issues, in order to get successful inventory and performance scans. I am planning to write a couple of posts to document tips that one generally doesn't find in documentation. In the meantime, [...]

In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab. In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup. Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]

Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions. One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite. In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]